Green Day: Bullet in a Bible [CD/DVD]Bullet in a Bible [CD/DVD] (2005)Green Day

Reviewer Rating: 4.5

User Rating:

Contributed by: AmandaElyseAmanda S(others by this writer | submit your own)Published on April 7th 2006Screaming. Cheering. Clapping. And so begins the historic Green Day show at Milton Keynes. Bullet in a Bible is both the DVD that documents the Keynes performance as a highlight in the American Idiot-fueled, Green Day sweeping of the word and a CD of the live performances on the DVD.
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Screaming. Cheering. Clapping. And so begins the historic Green Day show at Milton Keynes. Bullet in a Bible is both the DVD that documents the Keynes performance as a highlight in the American Idiot-fueled, Green Day sweeping of the word and a CD of the live performances on the DVD.

Directed by Samuel Bayer, the directorial force behind all of the music videos off of the Idiot album, the DVD offers a pretty accurate representation of a Green Day show. I was lucky enough to get to see one of the shows of the American Idiot Tour, and the footage captured on the DVD was in line with what I remember from seeing Green Day live: Tre Cool with his comic-relief sort of presence in the midst of his fantastically insane drumming; Mike, a strong and steady presence, but not without a fire in his bass playing; and Billie Joe's amazing ability to hold the crowd in the palm of his hand from first song to last, play his guitar in a whirl of talent and comfort, to sprint from one side of the stage to the other without losing anything in the vocals, and to keep punk rock fun, politically powerful without being overbearing, and infused with the proper dose of sexuality -- including an instance of stage-humping.

Throughout the show, Green Day proves why it is a band that has carved a place for itself in punk rock history, and the quality of the concert being shot on film adds to the legendary feel that this band projects, even from my fourteen-inch TV. The film allows for moments of on-screen depth and richness when the film shows, and whether it's the shots that are in color or black and white, the effect is seductive. Bayer makes his presence known not only in the color changes, but also in the quick switches between cameras. While this detracts some from the concert feel, I respect the talent with which Bayer pulls this off; he manages to replace some of the energy of actually seeing the show live with the dynamic camera work. Between the songs, Bayer cuts in band member commentaries and some backstage moments -- both of which contain sincerity, humor, a look at the California punks all grown up.

Also included is the tour that the band took of the Imperial War Museum, where the actual bullet in a bible is revealed. Although it would be nice to be able to watch the concert uninterrupted by the other footage, the quality of both is high enough that it's hard to complain about the shifts back and forth -- each moment is worth watching, regardless of the order.

As a live CD, Bullet delivers. Simple as that. Listening to the CD made me even more acutely aware of how well the sound at Keynes was captured for these recordings. The vocals and instruments are clear, and the voices and applause of the crowd are a testament to the spell that Green Day can place an audience under. The songs on the CD are the set list to a Green Day show of perfection, and include several Idiot tracks, the obligatory classics, and a fun cover of "Shout."

Bullet in a Bible captures a piece of the tour that had the world cheering for Green Day, and after watching Billie Joe don a crown for "King for a Day," all I have left to say is "All hail the king."

Why is everyone hating on Green Day, seriously? I like them but really why is everyone saying it's shit. It's good.

Anonymous (July 16, 2006)

i like punk rock with originality not the leather jacket clone punk swho fucked it all up....

Anonymous (May 5, 2006)

I love it so much!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!

Anonymous (April 18, 2006)

Maybe some people don't liked American Idiot because it's mainstream, Green Day "aren't punk", etc. but for me is an incredible record that changed my life and introduced me in punk rock.
All the last months I remember myself livin' my life while I heard it... "Jesus of Suburbia" when I was depressed and hating my life, "BLVD of broken dreams" while I was walkin' alone, " Wake me up when September ends" while I first kissed my previous boyfriend, "Extraordinairy Girl" when we broke up, "She's a rebel" when I fell in love again and a lot of other stuff...
After them I first heard The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Offspring, Bad Religion, NOFX. Because of Green Day I found I loved Punk Rock.
Billie Joe, Mike, Tre Cool, THANK YOU!!!
Keep rockin'!
-Punk Princess

Anonymous (April 11, 2006)

Then you deprived yourself of some perfectly valid criticisms in this case.

You'd have thought that such a big band could afford a DVD that... well, looked like there had been some effort put into making it.

I'm not even reading the rest of this board, because I can already imagine every attack and every rebuttle, not on the DVD, but on the band itself. It's a good DVD. It's what something with a high budget should look like. The CD is a bit boring, because it's basically the audio of the DVD, and the "hey/ho" interludes make it a bit boring to just listen to. It's a quality set though.

"i like green day. i love their music. i dont give a crap if you dont and start bitching about it. but i like em. so fuck you.
i hate the mtv-style shit (mtv should go to hell)
i hate how theyre all mainstream and shit
and last but not least THE TEENIES. *shudder*
yes i am a 14 year old girl but i dont go mental when i hear them. i actually find it annoying as hell walking by these bitches going around saying 'oh-em-gee! i like love billie joe hes like so like hawt! hes so shmexy!'

geez... it gives me a fucking headache..."

Holy crap.

Anonymous (April 11, 2006)

punk isn't insulting each other for liking somthing you don't. i think all the opinions on this thing are valid. i've been a big g.d. fan for a while and i didn't like this dvd. do i still like their music? hell yeah. do i like thier make-up? fuck no. but either way, it's the music, not the video or the make-up, or how un"punk" i am for even giving a shit. so fucking write you're own songs that make a difference and quit posting comments on websites. when you start to think your punk you just started to not be.

I saw Green Day on the Pop Disaster Tour when they weren't as good. I'm sure the show is better now with the American Idiot songs. Anyways, score is for Travis Barker being the first person to do that upside down drum trick on that tour.

It was the Mob! Oh...and you know what, let's end this argument. Everyone's entitled to like or dislike what they want, and should be allowed to. Let's just agree that punk comes in many forms, and that, no matter which you like, you're still a "one of us".

Anonymous (April 10, 2006)

i like green day. i love their music. i dont give a crap if you dont and start bitching about it. but i like em. so fuck you.
i hate the mtv-style shit (mtv should go to hell)
i hate how theyre all mainstream and shit
and last but not least THE TEENIES. *shudder*
yes i am a 14 year old girl but i dont go mental when i hear them. i actually find it annoying as hell walking by these bitches going around saying 'oh-em-gee! i like love billie joe hes like so like hawt! hes so shmexy!'

i love crass and i hate to try and downsize their lyrics but my disgust with you has lead me to do so:

"success is obedience to a structured way of life, you can't ignore the structure cause we're all within its sight."

"Dominating strict competition is the meaning of our lives
Stomping on the weak keeps us the winner of the battle in our minds
Tensions in our lives that are destroying our minds
Unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind
Conditioned to self-interest with emotions locked away
If that's what they call normal I'd rather be insane"

FuckYouOiOiOi- that's kinda...not cool. Operation Ivy does zero for me, at this point. " The sky is empty and it's turning different shades of colour/ it never did before and we never asked for war/ my mind is empty and my body different shades of torture/ it never was before and we never asked for war/ no one is moving and no doves fly here"...how's that fer lyrics?

feeding5000, i wanna kick your ass. and i'm not a violent person. just read the fucking lyrics in energy and if you're not blown away, go jack off to some obscure 80s hardcore band and think you're better than everyone else for doing it.

Ok here are my problems with this DVD.
-First off: The editing is just fucking awful. I hate this MTV style of filming where they believe the viewer is a A.D.D. moron who loses attention of what's going on after 2 seconds that they have to change from camera to camera to camera every 2 seconds. When I'm watching a DVD concert I want to have the camera hold on the important people for more than just 1 second before giving me some other awkward shot of them to then another.
-Second: this is Green Day playing to a huge open crowd outside. Do not fucking jiggle and wobble the camera around like it was homemade by some nobody with a shitty camera in a small venue. I want professional work, not stuff that sucks on purpose just to give it an "OMG THATS PUNX" feeling to the footage. This is concert footage, not a fucking music video.
-Third: Enough with this changing from color to black & white bullshit. This is Green Day at a fucking huge concert, just film it for what it is and quit trying to add all these bells & whistles bullshit to the footage just to make it look like it's something more than that. It‚??s so annoying to have that just happen out of nowhere and even during interviews.
-Fourth: Putting those three elements together is just an awful viewing experience. You can get over it but it is still annoying. Samuel Bayer just needs to fuck off for adding all these bells & whistle unnecessary bullshit to the footage. It makes this look more like one huge music video and not a documentation of a Green Day concert. There are also faults that don't involve the footage & editing are thus as follows...
-Fifth: This is not an entire Green Day concert. They cut out the less popular songs and cut out the whole full concert experience to make a money-making mass produced CD/DVD package to make the money off of the huge fan base that suddenly came out of American Idiot. This is more for casual fans than serious Green Day fans
-Sixth: the interviews aren't anywhere and in depth or informative as they should be. Again this is because this CD/DVD is for casual fans and not real Green Day fans.
Seventh: Ok the CD part really annoys me when you have songs like Brain Stew where the pyro is just overwhelming in the mix along with the crowd. When I‚??m listening to the CD I don‚??t care about the pyro or how loud the crowd gets because I don‚??t see them and thus I don‚??t care about them.
Eighth: This is for Green Day‚??s stage show in general‚?¶ Change your fucking stage show because it just gets so old and change around your set-list for crying out loud. They performed this exact same show everywhere ever since American Idiot came out. You‚??ve lost becoming a band and are now an arena pop act.

I got to say that overall it‚??s not awful but just very average and generic. I can‚??t say that a lot of effort went into this DVD/CD so that just makes it far more easier to point out every flaw in this release because it just feels more like a ‚??product‚?Ě than and actual ‚??effort‚?Ě if that makes any sense.

"Tre Cool with his comic-relief sort of presence in the midst of his fantastically insane drumming; Mike, a strong and steady presence, but not without a fire in his bass playing; and Billie Joe‚??s amazing ability to hold the crowd in the palm of his hand from first song to last, play his guitar in a whirl of talent and comfort, to sprint from one side of the stage to the other without losing anything in the vocals, and to keep punk rock fun, politically powerful without being overbearing, and infused with the proper dose of sexuality -- including an instance of stage-humping."
=OMG THE GREEN DAY GUYS ARE SO DREAMY!!! AND THEY HAVE SONGS THAT SOUND LIKE THEY HAVE DEPTH TO THEM!!!!!!!!!
score is for the review and the band, green day has always been rather mediocore. nothing more and now, plently less.

This band is so incredibly overrated it blows my mind. Yes, I know that word is overused a lot on this site, but in all honesty, Green Day clearly aren't the same band they used to be but people still ride them like they are some wonderful punk bastion, when they clearly fucking aren't. Yeah, I used to listen to them a lot, but times have changed and I'm fucking sick of hearing shit like "Wake Me Up When September Ends" everywhere. AI wasn't the greatest record ever. They've become a fucking arena rock band I can barely enjoy, aside from occasional "Kerplunk" or "Dookie" listens.

Anonymous (April 10, 2006)

I agree with the Pitchfork review of this record. Score is for both the review and the reviewed.

I'm beyond sick of Op Ivy. They weren't amazing. Maybe the best ska-punk band, but that's like saying Skrewdriver is the best Nazi band. EVERYONE seems to love Op Ivy, and there are almost as many kids with those goddamn "Energy" T-shirts at my school as there are people with those stupid fucking Ramones shirts. I like what PE says about The Shit Split: "Undoubtably among the very small handful of truly timeless bands from the sea of shit released by Lookout Records ". Hah.

Well, basically, Dookie was my first punk album, and I guess really the first CD I got that wasn't Weird Al or a movie soundtrack. I LOVED that record, and I bought another four Green Day CD's in the next couple months. That was about 4 years ago, and since then I haven't really listened to any of their stuff since. I only put 2 of those 5 CDs on my computer, and out of those, the only one I EVER listen to (not often) is Dookie. It just didn't hold up for me. Most of the Bay Area stuff from the late '80s, with the exception of Blatz, hasn't really been something I'd listen to. Green Day has become a disappointment. I'd call them a hipster band, but they're too mainstream for the hipsters.

Anonymous (April 8, 2006)

You know what's worse than a band that wears shirts? Sweaty guys in the crowd who don't.

Anonymous (April 8, 2006)

What's so new about those things that they'd only lower your estimation of Green Day now? Billie Joe's been wearing shirts, ties and eyeliner for years.

Anonymous (April 8, 2006)

Score is for black dress shirts, ties, eyeliner, and good bands gone bad.

Sure, the camera work is basically alright, sound and picture quality being fucking great. But no option to watch the show in its entirety? Why the fuck did they cut out Jaded after Brain Stew? And why the fuck do Green Day insist on playing Are We The Waiting live?

And the whole random black and white shots thing sucks too. Christ, it's an incredibly overused effect in documentaries/interviews/whatever. And as for the little doc. segments.... they reveal so little.

It's a cheap cash-in, basically, put together by someone who obviously doesn't really give a shit about the band. I love Green Day, but this is just bullshit. And I wish they'd change their live shows, because I'd imagine they're really beginning to grate on people over 14 years old.

And, just to finish off, I'm so glad that Green Day got me into good music in general. That way, I can say one of the genre defining bands of punk pop helped get me into music instead of something like, say, No Use For A Name.

I saw them on the Warning tour and had a really good time. Yeah, it was kinda arena-rockish, but this is a multi-platinum band and I expected such theatrics. They're a great big dumb rock band, not Fugazi. I think a show with just the three of them playing their instruments in a big arena would get boring real quick.

saw them twice on that tour... it was good times. but i only watched the dvd once. i cant watch live shows on my tv. not the way its meant to be.

and for everyone bitching about them: if you had gone to one of the shows, you would realize they were epic. they were meant to be like the small shows that most bands play in clubs, they were meant to be events.

Anonymous (April 7, 2006)

green day sucks period

Anonymous (April 7, 2006)

i tried to watch this,just to see what this band is doing these days, and i couldn't get through one song. pathetic Def Leppard-ish shit with basically no songs that i'd wanna hear. there is a video on youtube of them in 92 and its actually good. you know, small club,good songs,no rock star shit.

I saw these guys in 2000, and then I was thinking to their concert again in 2005, but then all the reviews started coming in and I figured I wasn't going to miss anything,

I'm pretty sure I made the right choice.

Anonymous (April 7, 2006)

i dont think that this review was what the dvd was all about. obvilously you guys are right on the act taht 14 year old proably wrote it, but still yet, some of u make it clear u dont fuckin like green day. i went to a concert las september, and yea i wanted to hear older stuff, but this is the fuckin american idiot tour, they wanted to play newer stuff.

Score is for the "hey-oh's" and the lack of anything that wasn't already heard on mainstream radio.

Anonymous (April 7, 2006)

I own this and the new bad religion dvd. What I hate is that they shoot these like music videos, changing cameras every two seconds. I wanted a still shots of the whole band playing similar to their tv appearances

Anonymous (April 7, 2006)

Green Day has always sucked. Thank Christ it was a band like NUFAN that introduced me to punk music; I don't ever have to worry about denying that shitty mainstream pop rock bands like Blink or Green Day got me here.

fuck you bitch i was gonna write a review for this shit as soon as i got around to watching the it. anyway, i woulda made it much less obvious that i was a fan and i woulda included more swears (not a single "fuck"?) but you said pretty much the same thing i woulda said (i've seen parts of it(on TV)). except my review woulda been more for the cd (i've been listening to that constantly. The two things you left out:

1- In hitchin a ride, when the crowd chants 1,2,3, you can hear their british accent.
2- in some songs billie joes voice cracks but thats a welcome flaw.

My current thoughts on Green Day? Let's just say that I overheard this on the bus:"So I totally went to the Green Day concert, and they were totally, like, moshpitting right in front of me! My dad, like, picked me up so I could see, and I totally took a picture of them!"

Anonymous (April 7, 2006)

Don't get me wrong, I love Green Day, but they are honestly the worst live band I've ever seen. They played essentially nothing off of Warning and Insomniac (my favorite GD albums) when I saw them. If they didn't have to spend 30 minutes on Hey-Oh's they could of at least played fucking Geek Stink Breath. They really don't need additional musicians either. Maybe an extra guitarist on a few songs, but give me a break.

Also, attending a concert where you already know every single thing that's going to happen because the band hasn't changed it's schtick in 10 years isn't much fun. I don't think american idiot is too bad, but it's a total frat boy show live.

oh man, i can't stand the hey-oh shit either. It's cute at first but then it just gets obnoxious when he keeps it going for five minutes. I have this one bootleg from 1994 that I'm pretty sure has the hey-oh stuff on it so he's been at it for quite a while.

I bought this the week it came out, and to be honest, I've barely touched it since then. I saw them twice on the Amerian Idiot tour, the second of which was the last night of the tour. That was such a fun show and the band was in such high spirits that night (and actually changed the set list!). The DVD can't compare to that show, but I'd say overall it is a pretty good document of the tour.

Wow, I was supposed to review this awhile back. It's a very well assembled live disc, though I kind of wish they had recorded a club show instead. The recent Bad Religion DVD was the perfect size for a live recording.

you know, i saw green day on their american idiot tour in la. i was so exicted seeing as how i had been listening to them since i was 12 years old. but all the glitz and glam and pirotechnics and billie running around without his guitar the whole fucking time....i wish i had see green day about 3 years ago, when they released warning, cuz damn, that show really sucked. i mean if your going to see a big band live, i would see green day, but i miss the good ole days of them acutally playing their fucking instruments.